THE American Physical Society and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory will join in sponsoring a Conference on Weak Interactions to be held October 27-29 in Gatlinburg, Tenn. As tentatively planned, the program will consist of six sessions, at each of which there will be invited speakers to review the subject under discussion. Although topics involving beta decay are expected to be emphasized, the conference will also be concerned with pi and mu decay and capture, as well as with strange particle decay. Abstracts of the contributed papers will be published in the Bulletin of the America?! Physical Society and the invited papers will appear in a subsequent issue of Reviews of Modern Physics.

THE ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION and the members of the American Physical Society have many mutual interests. For several years, their affairs have been closely interwoven. The atomic energy project, comprising activities formerly administered by the Corps of Engineers, and now under the Atomic Energy Commission, is a product of physics and physicists had a great deal to do with getting it started. I can think of no other industrial project of comparable size which relies as much on the wisdom of physicists for guiding its operations. Moreover, the growth of American physics and the welfare of American physicists owe a great deal to the Commission and its contractors. This agency gives employment to a large percentage of the membership of this Society; it also budgets for U. S. Treasury support for essential research facilities. Much of the work reported at this meeting, I note, has been financed by the AEC.

THERE are no liberal arts colleges in Israel. This fact became evident to me early in a recent visit to Israel. I was curious to learn how Israel's educational system differs from the American system, and what success Israel is having in this area. There are three institutions of higher learning which offer training in physics; one in or near each of the three major cities (see map).

THE neutrino is one of nature's strangest exhibits in the showcase of nuclear physics. Produced in the process of nuclear beta decay and very likely in the decay of certain members of the meson family, the neutrino lives on toward infinity with negligible probability of further interaction with matter, unaffected by anything except the gravitational field of the universe. It might be imagined that this peculiar behavior is sufficient for one particle, but as recent experimental developments stimulated by the theorists Lee and Yang have indicated, the neutrino may be near the heart of the parity puzzle: a given neutrino would seem to know right from left and to communicate this information via the law of conservation of angular momentum to particles with which it is associated in decay processes.

WEIZMANN Institute of Science, Rehovoth, Israel, will play host to an International Conference on Nuclear Structure to be held September 9-16 under the sponsorship of Unesco and IUPAP. Nine sessions are planned with two or three invited papers at each session. There will be no contributed papers. However, participants have been invited to present remarks during the 45-minute discussion period following each session. Those expecting to take part in the discussion must register for the Conference before July 31st and must submit a brief resume of their comments.

THIS is the fourth volume published in the series on Methods of Experimental Physics (see Physics Today, May 1960). It is the first of two parts devoted to "the principal methods and their relative merits for the measurement of a specific quantity in nuclear physics" where the term nuclear physics "comprises both the high- and low-energy regions". This is the aim stated in the preface by the distinguished editors. To prepare such a survey the editors have obtained the help of many well-known experts. The present volume covers principles and methods of particle detection, and the determination of charge, size, momentum, and energy. The particles and radiations studied in the low-energy region are discussed far more than those studied in high-energy physics.

AT the Westinghousi- Research Laboratories we have recently re-examined four questions which scientists have asked many times: (1) What does a corporation expect of a central research and development activity?; (2) Why carry out basic research in industry?; (3) Are scientific objectives and the profit motive compatible?; (4) What support should management provide the research scientist? The answers to these questions are important to us because they are important to our scientists. We have sought, therefore, to ask ourselves these and similar questions as directly as the scientists themselves would put them and then to seek answers in language just as understandable.

THE giant but youthful research laboratories in England and Europe are much less well known to Americans than the great foreign universities. This situation is changing as an increasing number of American physicists are making extended visits to laboratories such as Harwell, in England. The movement is made possible by the world-wide relaxation of security restrictions in the "basic" sciences, reactor engineering, and thermonuclear research as well as by the removal of classified work to separate sites. Today Harwell, for one, directly employs non-Commonwealth scientists including Americans while other visitors are "attached", meaning on leave from their regular posts and not paid by Harwell. And I should say at once that the enthusiasm of Egon Bretscher, head of Nuclear Physics, has sparked many visits to Harwell by American physicists.

My instructions this morning were to give a survey of the subject we call elementary particle physics, emphasizing the experimental aspects. I will choose what I believe to be interesting and exciting and try to see how we got where we are. The objects we call elementary particles have changed over the years and Fig. 1 is meant to illustrate this.

As you know, the macrobaryon falls just as fast as the macrolepton. The systematic search for the simple objects and their interactions may well have begun with Galileo in Pisa—the first, incidentally, almost vertical linear accelerator.

AS specialization increases within the various branches - of high- and low-energy nuclear physics, it becomes rather easy for an experimenter in one of the branches to lose touch with the details of advances in the methods and techniques of the others. Yet, many facets of apparently different techniques may well be valuable to experimenters in areas other than those for which they were originally developed.

This text, which presents detailed descriptions of many of the methods and techniques of experimental nuclear physics, is especially valuable in providing a point of contact not only for such experimenters but also for beginning research students. The discussions and intercomparisons between methods are often at the detailed level one would associate with hallway discussions and personal contacts at Physical Society meetings. In addition, the very complete lists of references make the retrieval of background information from other published sources especially easy.